Category : Guerrilla Craft

Focussing on the recent developments in strategic soft power, CARPA is just launching operation Crust Crusade along the US west coast. The project aims to employ the popular subculture of crust punk to leverage the agenda of US-controlled capitalism under the cloak of aesthetic dissent and rebellion. Using western contractors, each with an agenda of domination within their markets, the DoD employs lifestyle infiltration to produce pro-NATO sentiments amongst dissident youth groups in the middle-east and former Soviet republics.

“We need a new sustainable paradigm to stay ahead of the moving targets of lifestyle,” said Sandra Svenson, CARPA designer and program manager. “With Crust Crusade, the goal is to develop new viral consumer practices that are effective against a broad spectrum of adversarial ideologies, to make sure our style supremacy co-evolves and outpace reactionary elements.” As demonstrated by Svenson, such practices employ a wide range of disseminated DIY activities, not least the famous pro-american crust pants.

Until the recent strategic advances in crochet, the inaccuracies of individual stitches meant that patterns routinely ended up far from their intended designs, or worse, became imprecise “folk” works of art at the local craft fair. Now, with an ambitious new CARPA efforts and computational breakthroughs, the new program Expedited Crochet with Enhanced Stitch Stability (ECESS) is reaching the frontline of war-craft. Program manager Rennie McAardwark is heralding a modern-day breakthrough in atomic precision crochet stitches, analogous to the sub-atomic achievement in particle stitching and electron whittling at the labs at CERN. Not only will we soon see new Graphene-molecular sweatshirts for tech-Hipsters in Brooklyn or Portland, but more importantly, these new techniques will give warfighters enormous advantages related to camouflage, cunning and craftiness for extended operations after they last synchronized their stitches at their FOB or Stitch n’ Bitch. Semper Fiber!

CARPA’s Craft Hype Taxonomy and Evaluation (CHyTE) program seeks to investigate revolutionary technologies to asses and value craft hype around hand-made Etsy products that would significantly improve their arts potential through means other than adding more crochet or folk elements.

For the past 100 years, increasing the value of craft objects has boiled down almost exclusively to a simple equation: More folk expression equals higher cultural value. The art market’s ability to penetrate bullshit, however, has advanced faster than craft’s ability to withstand scrutiny. As a result, achieving even incremental improvements in craft survivability has required significant increases in “authenticity” which has utterly crippled the craft scenes across NATO-countries and its allies. With the new Craft Hype Taxonomy and Evaluation (CHyTE) program, the aim is to increase the status of craft while cutting the crap, figuratively speaking. “For many craft hipsters,” a spokesperson at CARPA said, ”this means goodbye to Etsy as well as the Craft Councils. We’re levelling up!”

My project for CARPA was based on quilt and stitch history, how it can look benign, while also hiding various codes and symbols. The idea was to embroider military 10-digit coordinates in the quilt (basic log cabin style squares) in several similar colors. Coordinates that operatives would need to go to would be stitched in thermochromic-dyed thread that would change color when introduced to heat. White cotton thread was dyed with thermochromic pigment and changed from a rust color to an orange when a heated object was put next to it (a foot/hand warmer that one might use in the field to get warm reaches the 86 degrees necessary to change color). The idea here was a to produce a quilt that would look just like a quilt with numbers, but would provide necessary information when individuals with the correct knowledge/equipment showed up. The same quilt would just appear to be a quilt to any passersby (or users), therefore hiding any sensitive information.

What I didn’t count for was the temperature threshold of the dyed thread itself and that the desert would exceed it! Foiled! The project did work at a minimum level, although not as well as I had hoped. The possibilities of thermochromic dyed thread are endless and could even conceivably be used in a military environment.

The recent craft resurgence, not least the asymmetric and population-centric so-called “guerrilla craft”, demonstrates the strategic significance of tactical actions by junior and noncommissioned crafters who interact with local populations. This kind of interaction , often carried out by Counter-Craft Teams (CoCraT), benefits from extensive cultural training, not least in popular subjects such as Hippie History and Etsy Ethnography. The sociocultural training offered by CARPA is based on virtual training simulations, immersive workshops in craft techniques and strategic briefings on the contemporary cultural conditions of craft.